The IRS grants over 60,000 organizations tax exempt status from the each year. The vast majority of these new nonprofits are small organizations with a big idea and an ambitious founder. But most of them will never grow to have a large impact and fulfill their missions. In fact, it’s very common for organizations to stagnate with annual budgets below $500,000.

We explore the question “Why do some organizations flourish while others flounder” with Kahtleen Janus, a social entrepreneur, lecturer, and Co-Founder of Spark™. We discusses her new book Social Startup Success: How the Best Nonprofits Launch, Scale Up, and Make a Difference as the playbook of how to build your organization and the nonprofit sector. She emphasizes:

*****Timestamped Highlights*****
(3:09) Kathleen shares her inspiration in writing her book
(5:04) A common obstacle nonprofits face
(7:00) Getting over the hump: growing your budget from 500,000 to 2,000,000 with 5 steps
(7:30) Step 1: Create a culture of innovation- the importance of testing and improving as they grow.
(7:45) Step 2: Measuring impact to scale more quickly
(8:35) How to measure impact and scale with relatively little money in the bank
(10:03) Braven: an organization measuring impact by using specific data metrics
(11:48)- Advancing your metrics: Testing the Counterfactual:
(14:04) Step 3: Find your funding model
(15:05) Step 4: Build a culture of collective leadership for growth
(16:26) Number 5: Make storytelling a practice for growth
(22:00) Kathleen shares a dirty secret and honest truth
(23:20) A Success Story from Focusing on Resources: Last MileHealth Women’s Healthcare Clinic
(28:36) Problematic tendency: lack of incentive to acknowledge failure in the nonprofit sector.
(32:05) Kathleen shares how she knows when it is time to quit

Shantel Khleif shares how she built a social media base with over 20,000 followers. In this episode, she outlines which platform is best for your nonprofit, ways to engage your followers, and whether you should be paying to boost posts and pages.

Shantel possesses extensive knowledge of social media. She is the co-founder of Imagine Media, and ger company has been profiled in Entrepreneur Magazine, Georgia Public Broadcasting, Atlanta Magazine, and a ton of blogs and podcasts.

The highlights of the show include (timestamps):

(3:37) How she built a base of over 20,000 followers on social media

(5:35) The ideal number of weekly posts to make on each social media platform (FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest)

About Successful Nonprofits Podcast Host Dolph GoldenburgDolph is recognized as a high performance leader in the nonprofit sector who served as a nonprofit CEO for a dozen years and a fundraiser for an additional ten years. Author of the book Successful Nonprofits Build Supercharged Boards, Goldenburg also founded a boutique consulting firm based in Atlanta.

It seems like every nonprofit, business, and public personality has an email lists these days. Today we’ll learn how your nonprofit email list competes in this crowded arena – not just with similar nonprofits but also against your constituency’s grocery store, hair salon, house of worship, and civic group for that valuable in box attention.

Our conversation today is with Mr. Leads himself, Carlos Scarpero. He is known throughout the community as Mr. Leads because he helps organizations grow by leveraging the power of email marketing. While his breadth of experience includes social media and web design for organizations, he now focuses all of his attention and expertise on helping your email standout from the competition.

Conversation Highlights (time stamp):

(3:58) How to build a good email list

(4:55) The importance of getting permission to add people to your email list

(7:22) An innovative new trend: “text to join our email list”

(8:32) The problem with paper sign-up email list forms

(9:59) The importance of segmenting your email list

(13:30) The email list analytics you should pay attention to

(14:06) Analyzing why people unsubscribe from your email list

(15:30) How frequently you should email your list

(19:06) Using auto-responder series to build your base

(22:58) Best practices for nonprofit email lists

(23:54) How to keep your mass email from being flagged as spam

(26:05) The email practices that will poison your list

(27:34) The number of staff hours necessary to begin an email marketing program

About Successful Nonprofits Podcast Host Dolph GoldenburgDolph is recognized as a high performance leader in the nonprofit sector who served as a nonprofit CEO for a dozen years and a fundraiser for an additional ten years. Author of the book Successful Nonprofits Build Supercharged Boards, Goldenburg also founded a boutique consulting firm based in Atlanta.

This week we enjoyed a lively conversation with the technological renaissance man Adam J. Walker. Adam, a minister turned tech guru, founded the for-profit website development company Sideways8. He also started a nonprofit 48in48, which recruits volunteer coders to build 48 nonprofit websites in 48 hours and launched the podcast Tech Talk Y’all.

Our conversation included (timestamps in parentheses):

(6:15) How to develop crisp, clear, and concise text for your website

(8:00) Elements that every nonprofit website should have

(9:15) How to develop a website that speaks to multiple constituencies (volunteers, donors, prospective clients, etc).

(11:30) How to ensure your website is mobile-friendly

(12:30) The benefits and drawbacks of using a platform like Word Press, Weebly, Square, Wix, etc.

(14:00) Using themes and plug-ins on your website to make it look professional and add functionality.

(18:15) Websites that Adam thinks are excellent (that he did not build)

(20:20) The website building nonprofit 48 in 48 – that recruits volunteer coders to build 48 websites in 48 hours

About Successful Nonprofits Podcast Host Dolph GoldenburgDolph is recognized as a high performance leader in the nonprofit sector who served as a nonprofit CEO for a dozen years and a fundraiser for an additional ten years. Author of the book Successful Nonprofits Build Supercharged Boards, Goldenburg also founded a boutique consulting firm based in Atlanta.

This episode offers a featured conversation with Dr. Jeff Thompson, a pediatrician, author, sought-after speaker, and CEO Emeritus of Gundersen Health System in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Dr. Thompson is author of the recently published book Lead True and his perspective shines throughout the book: when others are afraid of the risk, the timing, or the possible failure, true leaders step forward to meet a need.

As most listeners know, healthcare systems often represent the largest, most complex nonprofit organizations – perhaps second only to colleges and universities.

During his successful CEO tenure at Gundersen, Dr. Thompson not only improved health outcomes but also used hospital resources to serve as a catalyst for rebuilding the surrounding community, helped patients die with dignity (even though it wasn’t in the organization’s financial best interest), and become a green organization while dramatically curtailing the rising cost of providing healthcare.

And he did all this while protecting the financial well-being of hospital employees, patients, and the community. True to his ethos, Dr. Thompson is donating his proceeds from this book to the Gundersen Foundation Leadership Development Fund!

About Successful Nonprofits Podcast Host Dolph GoldenburgDolph is recognized as a high performance leader in the nonprofit sector who served as a nonprofit CEO for a dozen years and a fundraiser for an additional ten years. Author of the book Successful Nonprofits Build Supercharged Boards, Goldenburg also founded a boutique consulting firm based in Atlanta.

From the moment we get up in the morning until our eyes close at night, we are bombarded with marketing messages. Today we get marketing messages through our phone’s apps, online, via email, on the radio, on tv, and through the old fashioned postal mail.

Is it any wonder that traditional marketing messages aren’t working? After all, we have to cut through a very cluttered marketing environment in order to reach our nonprofit’s prospective volunteers, advocates, and donors.

This is why many nonprofits are turning to a content marketing approach that creates and distributes content that is relevant and valuable to our target audience. To help explore content marketing for your nonprofit, we spoke with Robert McGuire. Robert has decades of experience in journalism and marketing, and his firm McGuire Editorial is a recognized leader in content marketing.

Our conversation covered a lot, including:

Ensuring your media messages compete for your audience

Finding the right channels to broadcast your content

Micro-conversions that get your audience to take the small steps toward

Segmenting and messaging to those who take small steps (such as clicking “like” on facebook or signing up for your newsletter)

The minimum amount of time needed to launch a content marketing campaign

Dolph is recognized as a high performance leader in the nonprofit sector who served as a nonprofit CEO for a dozen years and a fundraiser for an additional ten years. Author of the book Successful Nonprofits Build Supercharged Boards, Goldenburg also founded a boutique consulting firm based in Atlanta.

I’ve been thinking a lot about stories lately after reading an incredible book titled: The Story Telling Nonprofit by Vanessa Chase Lockshin. This is a practical guide to telling stories that raise money and awareness, and the Amazon reviews for this book are incredible.

Readers said things like:

This book reinforced so many good storytelling habits and introduced several more

This book should be required reading for all fundraisers and non-profit professionals!

This is definitely for you if you're looking for a more concrete way to tell nonprofit stories and gather stories from staff and board.

I found the book useful, and felt strongly that the principles Vanessa lays out in the book can be used whether you are in the nonprofit, for-profit, and government sectors.

Our conversation with Vanessa Chase Lockshin includes:

How nonprofits can use stories

Identifying your audience and why create a faux person

Elements of a good story

And more! Be certain to download this episode and start writing more compelling stories for your nonprofit!

Link to purchase her book The Story Telling Nonprofit (click book cover):

​Dolph is recognized as a high performance leader in the nonprofit sector who served as a nonprofit CEO for a dozen years and a fundraiser for an additional ten years. Author of the book Successful Nonprofits Build Supercharged Boards, Goldenburg also founded a boutique consulting firm based out of Atlanta.

It’s the week after Thanksgiving for the podcast listeners in America, and you know what that means. Christmas trees, menorahs, stockings, and dreidels seem to be everywhere. The malls are full of shoppers, charities are sending their holiday fundraising appeals, and media outlets everywhere are looking for those heartwarming holiday stories.

We’ll soon see lots of newspaper, magazine, and television features about lives changed for the better. Each of these stories will directly or indirectly highlight the work of nonprofit organizations, and almost all of them will have been pitched by a nonprofit.

Every year, board members and executive directors wonder “how can we get our good work in the New York Times, the Wiregrass Gazette, or the Portland Tribune?“

To help you solve this puzzle, we invited media strategist Peter Panepento to join us. Peter is the principal at Panepento Strategies, a full-service content, digital, and social-media strategy consultancy serving many prominent nonprofit clients: Guidestar, National Center for Family Philanthropy, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Before launching the practice, Peter spent more than a decade covering the nonprofit and foundation world at The Chronicle of Philanthropy — first as a contributing writer and most recently as the editor who managed its online and social media presence, as well as its research and data projects, webinars and new products.

Peter shared the steps for successfully garnering media attention this holiday season, including how to:

Pick the right "story" to meet your goals

Pitch the story to editors/producers

Find the right media outlets to pitch to

Get "media ready" before an editor says "yes”

Build momentum from your media moment

Use your well-crafted story if no media outlet uses it

With the valuable information Peter shared, your organization can pitch its own heart-warming holiday story to the local media. Peter noted it’s not too late to get holiday media coverage, but you’ll need to act quickly to make the holiday news cycle.

We spoke with nonprofit consultant Eleanor Boyd this week about the first two stages of the nonprofit lifecycle: infancy and adolescence. We discussed not just the key characteristics of infant (or start-up) organizations, but also the strategic steps organizations can take to transform themselves into more stable adolescent organizations.

This is a "must listen" for any start up organization wanting to get to the next level.
Boyd also shared some excellent resources for small nonprofits who cannot afford to hire a consultant. Specifically, she recommended finding your statewide nonprofit association, the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and several additional online resources:

When Bill Lutz started as the Executive Director of an outreach ministry called The New Path, he brought a strong management and leadership background to a traditional ministry. Within six months of accepting the position, he learned that he often did not learn about an issue until it was a “full fledged disaster or catastrophe mode.”

For this reason, he created and implemented a quarterly “Pulse Survey” to measure the three key organizational indicators:

Strategy

Execution

Culture

The survey is sent every three months to staff, board, volunteers, partners, and other key constituents. Started in 2015, they have sent the survey for five quarters.

The first survey resulted in a strong response – noting both issues to work on and strengths to celebrate. During the first few quarters, the survey indicated low numbers on “strategy”. And this provided data to help the board understand the importance of allocating funds to hire a strategic planning consultant and completing a strategic planning process.

Our conversation also included:

Deciding who should receive the survey

Communicating survey results to the constituents who receive the survey

The benefits of the survey (such as increased board and partner engagement)

Many of us (including this podcaster) started our nonprofit careers without thinking about a professional brand. But how we brand ourselves professionally shapes our career and our lives for years to come. In fact. every stage of a nonprofit professional’s career offers opportunities to brand yourself based on your competencies, core values, and vision.

To help us better understand how to brand ourselves, we spoke with Kristin Battista Frazee, who is truly a renaissance woman. Holding an MSW from Columbia University, she has been a geriatric social worker, legislative assistant at a Capitol Hill lobbying firm, published magazine and book author, marketing consultant, and personal branch coach for social and human service professionals.
Our Featured Conversation included how to

Find opportunities to promote yourself that is reflective of your values

Elevate your brand by writing for trade journals and presenting on your area of expertise

We also discussed her bookThe Pornographer's Daughter: A Memoir of Childhood, My Dad, and Deep Throat, with a special emphasis on what the book can teach us about building a personal brand that overcomes adversity.

The case for support isn’t just a tool for capital campaigns. As fundraising expert Linda Lysakowski notes, the case for support is an essential tool that ensures consistency among all fundraising and marketing efforts.

Linda, who has trained over 30,000 fundraising professionals through her seminars and authored over a dozen books on the topic, shares her insight and expertise on developing and using the case for support.

A few highlights of the conversation included:

Delegating just one author while including a variety of voices in the process

Using both emotion and reason in writing the case for support

Ensuring the case statement is written from a fundraising perspective (not just a marketing perspective)